Tuesday, 17 December 2013

The Battle for the Curriculum

by John Yandell

I want
to start with the words of someone not obviously connected with the recent (and
ongoing) furore over GCSE grades. G.S.
Gordon was the second Professor of English at Oxford. This is him writing to his wife in 1910 –
it’s the last paragraph of a longer letter:

I hope the new maid is as illiterate and competent as ever. It would be
a sad day if she took to reading at her age! That’s how Socialists are made.

(Gordon 1943: 44)

There
is a direct link between Professor Gordon’s views and those of Michael Gove.
Both are fully paid-up subscribers to the rationing school of education. This is predicated on the idea that, as
another right-wing ideologue had it, ‘More will mean worse’ (that was Kingsley
Amis, bemoaning the expansion of higher education in 1960). From this
perspective, opening up education to the masses means a dilution of standards,
so the masses must be kept out. Gove and
Ofqual have now decided that fewer will mean better.

The right
are fond of using the lexis of economics to advance their policies in
education. A-levels are the ‘gold standard.’ (No, they aren’t. The gold
standard was abandoned in the 1920s, a moment that upset Churchill and a bunch
of other British imperialists.) What we must now guard against is ‘grade
inflation’. There is precious little
evidence that this is a real phenomenon; what is undeniably true is that more
students have been getting higher grades.
There are two pretty obvious reasons for this:

(i)more students are working harder, getting better grades because they
realise that in the current economic climate this might possibly lead to
(better) jobs.

(ii)schools, under immense pressure from league tables and Ofsted, have
become more and more adept at meeting the production targets (intervention
groups and so on).

Suddenly,
this success is a bad thing. It doesn’t
sit well with the new austerity programme.
So Gove and his mates at Ofqual abandon two decades of criterion
referencing and go back to the bad old days of norm referencing. You don’t get a grade C because your work
meets the specified criteria for a grade C; you get a C if you are in the top x
per cent of a cohort.

And
somehow this new system is meant to be more rigorous. This word rigour has become
a stick to beat the GCSEs with.

Now,
there might have been problems with GCSEs, but we shouldn’t forget that they
were the first set of public exams in this country that were pretty much a
universal qualification. Having one exam for everyone (instead of the separate
O-levels and CSEs that they replaced) was a progressive move, even if it was
always fraught with contradictions. And there has been a fairly consistent
strand in the development of the GSCEs that has been about making knowledge
more accessible. This isn’t the same thing at all as debasing standards. But it looks that way if what you’re about is
maintaining exclusivity.

What
Gove means by rigour is something else entirely:

It was an
automatic assumption of my predecessors in Cabinet office that the education
they had enjoyed, the culture they had benefitted from, the literature they had
read, the history they had grown up learning, were all worth knowing. They
thought that the case was almost so self-evident it scarcely needed to be made.
To know who Pericles was, why he was important, why acquaintance with his
actions, thoughts and words mattered, didn’t need to be explained or justified.
It was the mark of an educated person. And to aspire to be educated, and be
thought of as educated, was the noblest of ambitions.

(Gove 2011)

Gove
doesn’t just want to ration access to education; he wants to keep it just as it
used to be, in the good old days (that never were). The schooling that was good enough for
Gladstone is good enough for Gove and good enough for the youth of today.

There
is a mad circularity about all of this, a circularity that is a denial of
history, of progress, of development. No
single sphere of human knowledge or activity is the same now as it was when
Gladstone went to school. Knowing about
Pericles is good and fine – but shouldn’t the youth of today also know
something about particle physics? Even
literature has moved on a bit – different texts have been produced, some of
them involving all sorts of fancy new technologies, like moving pictures and so
forth.

What
this means is that the concept of rigour really isn’t terribly straightforward.
Knowledge is differently constructed now, in the world, and it is entirely
appropriate that schooling should reflect these differences.

This
may seem a long way away from our current concerns about GCSE grades, but what
Gove is now proposing, on the back of the grading scandal, is the abolition of
GCSEs and the imposition of something much more like O-levels (even if the
Liberals won’t let him call them that).

This
is Gove taking us back to a very Gladstonian future. The argument is about
assessment, for sure, but it is also about the content of education. Look
at the new Teachers’ Standards: central control of pedagogy (synthetic phonics
as mandatory), curriculum (all teachers responsible for promoting ‘the correct
use of Standard English’) and a particularly reactionary set of values (British
values, the rule of law, and so forth).

Of
course, Gove’s position is more contradictory than this. He wants to ration
education through capping the number of students who can achieve particular
grades. But simultaneously he raises the
‘floor standard’ – demanding that in all secondary schools at least 40 per cent
of students attain 5 GCSEs at A*- C. These two policy elements are completely
incompatible. And they lead the way to more forced academy conversions.

This
word rigour has become a stick to beat teachers with.

Externally
set and marked exams are a very blunt instrument. But, of course, if the function of the
assessment is to act as a sorting mechanism, then exams do the job perfectly
well. If the aim is to arrive at a
certain quota of sheep, or A-level students, then why waste time on anything more
nuanced?

What
happened in the summer was that students who had been predicted a grade C –
students whose teachers were pretty confident that they should get a grade C –
ended up with grade Ds. It is a stark case of grade deflation. But I want to focus attention on this
business of prediction.

In
most spheres of life, when we talk about predictions, we measure these against
actual events. So the weather forecast is a prediction about what the weather
will be like, at a particular time and in a particular place. The forecast uses
evidence, of various kinds and varying degrees of sophistication. The question of the accuracy of a weather
forecast is easily determined: we can test it out by what actually happens. Did
it rain today?

Likewise
predictions about horse-racing are testable against the race itself. If I give
you a tip for the 4.30 at Newbury, you are entitled to judge the usefulness and
the accuracy of the tip, and probably of me as a tipster, by what actually
happens in the 4.30 at Newbury.

Now,
the commonsense approach to predicted GCSE grades would be the same as outlined
above. An English teacher predicts a
grade C for her student; he gets a grade D; the prediction was wrong,
demonstrably, because the prediction did not match what actually happened in
the exam.

But
this is nonsense. A GCSE exam is not
like the 4.30 at Newbury. The claims that a GCSE result purports to make about
a student are not limited to what happened in an exam hall on a particular
afternoon in June: they are claims about what that student knows and can do, in
relation to a range of texts and practices that have been gathered together
under the heading of ‘English’.

In
fact – in the real world where people talk, read and write a variety of
different texts for different audiences and purposes – that GCSE student’s
English teacher is in the best position to say what that student knows and can
do. In this situation, then, the
prediction shouldn’t really be construed as a prediction at all: it is a
statement based on detailed, in-depth professional knowledge, from someone who
has been able to build up a picture of that student’s learning and development
over time. The teacher has a mass of
evidence on which to base this professional judgement – evidence much more robust because it is more
plentiful and also because it is much more diverse than the evidence that can
be provided by a single exam.

Now
all of the above is true, I think, even in a situation where what the student
does in the exam is subjected to fair, transparent, criterion-referenced
assessment procedures. What about in a
situation where the grade boundaries are manipulated to satisfy a higher
power’s arbitrary judgements about how many students should be awarded a particular
grade?

And,
let’s be clear, that is precisely what happened this summer. That’s what Ofqual’s report tells us. They decided that the proportion of students
who were awarded grade C or above should be adjusted downwards because, among
other reasons, there were more private school students entered for alternative
qualifications (the iGCSE, say), and so they made the assumption that the
calibre of the cohort entered for the GCSE would be poorer than in the previous
year. And guess what? As the TES
revealed (28 September), the students who have been hit hardest by the shift in
the grade boundaries have been working class and minority ethnic students. What
exactly does rigour mean in these circumstances?

This
word rigour has become a weapon in Gove’s class war.

What
we need to do is to develop a clear, coherent alternative – an alternative
model of curriculum and assessment, in the interests of the mass of students,
not a privileged minority. And we need to be prepared to argue for this
alternative.